Fake news stories have been around for as long as truthful ones. One element that distinguishes the contemporary moment is the existence of a fairly novel information infrastructure with a scale, scope, and horizontality of information flows unlike anything we had seen before. Facebook, for instance, reaches more than 1 billion users daily. This infrastructure enables people to create content alongside established media institutions, and not merely consume it. This, in turn, has allowed previously silent voices to be heard, not just in their localities but all over the world. We have credited these changes with contributing to the breakdown of authoritarian regimes such as in the case of the Arab spring. But these are the same changes that have made it possible for a fake news story about Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump to be shared hundreds of thousands of times.
Most post-election reports on fake news have focused on production side issues, such as the location and potential motivations of the various purveyors of fake news; the changing geopolitical landscape of information warfare; the economic benefits for social media and search engine platforms; and the need and desirability to implement technical and/or financial restrictions that could minimize the spread of misinformation, among others. A production side focus is important and these are all valid instantiations of it. However, this piece examines the other side of the coin by concentrating on some reception dynamics that might undergird the greater prevalence of fake news in the contemporary setting than in the past.
What does this mean for the future of journalism, at least in the short term? Despite the widespread cry for technical solutions and commercial sanctions, it is unlikely that things will change drastically until there are concurrent transformations in reception practices. It may be possible to develop algorithms that identify sources that have repeatedly propagate false information and automatically impose restrictions on their ability to get advertisement revenues. That might bring a temporary fix to centralized attempts to maliciously misinform. But I suspect that those perpetrators could easily dismantle a given operation and quickly launch another one. In addition, this would not necessarily stop decentralized sources of fake news that either intentionally or unintentionally create or spread false accounts on social media.
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